a few of my favorite things

One of the conferences I’ve been most looking forward to attending this year is Constructing Modern Knowledge, an annual gathering where educators are challenged to take off their teacher hats, and become learners and makers themselves. This being my first year attending, I only had very vague ideas of what to expect. I knew that day one would consist of the full group throwing out ideas for potential projects and the resulting chaos of 100+ adults signing up for projects they might be interested in working on. Amongst other things (like oh, I don’t know, an incredible cast of faculty and fellows, a ridiculous amount of toys and gadgets to play with, etc etc), I was really impressed by the variety of project ideas and how willing everyone was to work on things they either don’t know anything about or that don’t relate at all to what they teach.

I talk about the two projects I worked on in two other posts: fabric speakers and an interactive neuron. So here, I’ll simply talk about what I took away from these four intensive days of making (other than fabric speaker prototypes, awesome videos and photos, and lots of wonderful new people to connect with):

• It’s good to give teachers time to be selfish and just do projects for themselves that don’t need to directly relate to their day jobs. (And really, isn’t that true for just about everyone?) Many times, the teachers themselves will find ways to tie what they’re working on back to things they can do in the classroom anyway. Encourage playfulness, whimsy, and controlled chaos.  The question now becomes: How might I incorporate this philosophy into some of the teacher training we do during the school year back at Casti?
• You need large chunks of uninterrupted, unscheduled time to really get into the flow of making. I know this isn’t exactly realistic for most schools but I wonder if there are still ways to redesign schedules to allow for this type of deep dive every so often. (Related to this, I sure hope I get selected to be on our schedule redesign committee back at school this year because I definitely have things to say now!)
•  I enjoyed having the freedom to work by myself when I wanted to and want to give my students this choice too. Granted, I also think the ability to collaborate effectively is a critical life skill, so most likely, a balance should be struck: required group work for some projects, optional for others.

My last take-away? I sure hope my school will send me back again next year. There are so many more toys and gadgets I’d love to play with!

Last week, I got to get away from school for a couple of days to attend FabLearn, a conference on digital fabrication in education hosted by our collaborators, Dr. Paulo Blikstein and his lab at Stanford. I met so many interesting people and got to play with various cool toys, including things like TinkerCAD (a simple, easy to use 3D design app on the web with what seems to be some social networking functions as well as upgrades for extending their library of forms with JavaScript), Fritzing (software tool to help with teaching and sharing of electronic circuit designs), and Arduinos (yay!!). I was extremely honored to be asked to be part of the educators panel and the best part for me was meeting my fellow panelists, all of whom are doing such exciting things in this space, e.g. Hack the Future, Athenian School, Castanheiras School in Brazil, and Beam Camp.

The conference gave me so many ideas for projects, collaborations, and ways of thinking about incorporating building and tinkering in K-12 education. If I had to pick one thing that really resonated with me, I would say it has to be the research of Dr. Sherry Hsi from Lawrence Hall of Science. She is working on finding a way to measure and assess curiosity!

In a talk I went to many years ago, Dr. Jeff Goldstein of the National Center for Earth and Space Science Education talked about how science is really just a way to organize curiosity. And now, in almost all of projects we do in our lab, I want kids to wonder about things – how something works, why it works that way, can it work any other way, etc etc. So if there is a way to measure curiosity, that would be an incredible way to assess whether the projects we do and the way we teach is really having the desired effect of making kids more curious. The next step is then empowering them to go one step further and teaching them the tools to satisfy that curiosity, whether by doing research, building prototypes, or what not.

Dr. Hsi talked about a type of study they did where they gave kids cameras and asked them to record everything they wonder about throughout the day. At the end of each week, they looked through the pictures and reflected on what they were curious about. Over the course of months, they can track how curiosity fluctuates and they are also trying to find ways to distinguish different types of curiosity, e.g. how something works and why something doesn’t make sense versus specific facts.

Other highlights from the conference:

• many cool projects coming out of Mike Eisenberg’s Craft Tech lab at Univ of Colorado, including physical input devices for 3D modeling, 3D printing using kid-friendly materials (like chocolate!!)
• being introduced to the amazing metal sculptures of Bathsheba Grossman
• Howtosmile.org
• the discussion about how to create equitable spaces for tinkering where everyone gets to participate (versus the moms holding jackets problem)
• instead of aiming for the highest technical level of some project, there is a lot of learning even in the more whimsical and low tech projects
• LEDs as “gateway drugs”
• cool products like Tangles (3D Tangrams), DrawBot, Midas, Hummingbird, etc

I am wildly inspired by all that I saw/played with/heard and all the people I met. Can’t wait until next year!